oh right

Considering the enormous amount of productivity that has not emerged from my month off, I'm not surprised that my originally blistering pace of writing for th[is] public domain didn't hold up. Basically, I had a math thesis I was going to write, but haven't, I have some movies I was going to watch, books I was going to read, and skiing I was going to do that didn't happen, and I have some dinners I didn't cook. But these things should not obscure the reading I did do, the dinners I did cook, and the bars I did go to with friends. (Note that I didn't mention the thesis in the latter sentence) Anyway, I choose to believe that the reason my achievements measure up so poorly to my expectations is that I really did need a break. Also, it snowed a lot and I had the stomach flu, both of which led to my sleeping away lots of otherwise productive days. Which is not to say that sleeping in is intrinsically bad--if I actually felt that way, I'd like to think I'd sleep in a lot less. It just happens to have cut into the time I had for other things. Like things I kinda needed to do.

Oh, and I have some thoughts spurred a little by the stomach flu, a little by some stuff I read, a little by talking to friends doing bio research, but they aren't quite ready. Also, they aren't, like, gross, or anything--the stomach flu fits in as more of an abstract idea than a visceral process.

In the meantime, I had a couple quick observational things: first, I went to the National Western Stock Show on monday (featured event: professional bull-riding), and I remembered how much I enjoy it. The way public voices around the event talked about "preserving the old ways" led me to a comparison of our celebration of western ranch culture and the movie "A Prairie Home Companion," which venerates a classical Scandinavian midwest. I feel like my feelings about the culture of the Stock Show are incredibly compromised by my place as a fundamentally City Person, but there's so much beauty and tradition touched with sadness in the West as an institution that it's easy to become transfixed by the depiction of a Way of Life while forgetting we watched that bullriding sitting a row above or a row below people who make their living on ranches. Even as the PA announcer made several passing jokes about the "Denver people" mixing in with the authentic National Western participants and I knew they were directed at people like me, I didn't feel like my place there was being contested. Denver, as host city for the Stock Show every year (which makes january days frequently smell like cow regardless of where you are in the city), still has a kind of credibility in that setting. I enjoyed the whole of the stock show, and even though I don't know the last person in my family to farm (a couple generations ago, at least), my nonparticipation didn't make me feel like a total outsider--between what outdoorsiness I have left over from working at REI, the Eagle Scout thing, and just being from Colorado, I felt comfortable at the National Western Complex, which honestly seems a little surprising in retrospect.

We rode the new lightrail line downtown last night; trains on the union station line came every half-hour, even during evening rush hour. I just have to say: that makes NO SENSE. If Denver wants lightrail to really serve as its "world class city" mass-transit, it's gotta step it up.